Here We Go Down the Slippery Slope If the zealots responsible for airbrushing Colston continue, how long can the name Bristol survive? What about renaming it Utopia...? R.L Smith (If) this student level of empty gesturing previals and everywhere in our fair city is renamed Mandela Street... Rob Pearce ….just rename everything you can, change the name Bristol to Constant Guilt. F Cannon For those against capital and corporal punishment, please rename Birch Road, Hung Road and Redlynch lane. For animals liberationist, change Badgers Lane, Dolphin Street (continue for four columns) Rob Pearce
The Pyre of Denthor If people are offended by the building, maybe it should be razed to the ground C Stephens If you are serious than raze the building the ground… Colin McNamee. What next, witch hunts? F Cannon Ah well, what next? Maybe we’ll burn a few books that we don’t like in Queens Square, before they rename it. C Stephens
Dead Cat’s Society Unless Louise Mitchell, chief executive of the Bristol Music Trust can categorically prove that none of her ancestors were in any way involved with slavery, she should resign… MJ Dupont We were slaves once, the Roman Empire. I don’t see the bleeding hearts complaining about anythign with a Roman name F Cannon Ah div nae wint sugar on ma porritch Be assured that it will always be remembered by us true Bristolians as the Colston Hall Terry Pring I hope all like minded Bristolians will complain long and loud Rob Pearce I am sure that genuine Britolians are cpable of living in the shadow of whatever has gone before… A Bevington Before jumping into a decision to chane the name of the Colston Hall I think those involved, who may not even be Bristolians, ought to do more historical research… Pamela Mitchell Also is Dr Horton a Britolian? E Jones May I suggest to those in favour of changing the name of the Colston Hall, we have a very good coach, bus and train station. If you don’t like Bristolian histoy then feel free to make use of them. A Hughes
Viva la brigada de corrección política! In my opinion it is another stark example of politically correct fascism that we could well do withiout. C Stepens I would suggest that political correctness is the real reason Chris Johnson Pandering to a current political correct few after generations of use as the Colston Hall. Colin McNamee "Genocide is supposed to be reprehensible, but..." Colston may have been a slave-trader and hence anti-humanitarian, but… Francis Harvey I agree that the slave trade was a disgrace but… Tim Mahooney I do not believe these past actions of individuals or governments are acceptable however… Chris Johnson Why are we vilifying Edward Colston when he was only engaging in an accepted trade of the time? Why after nearly 400 years has this been blown out of all proportion? Pamela Mitchel Send forth the best ye breed... Europeans did not invent the slave trade. The slaves were made by their own people E Jones The real culprits in the slave trade were the black Africans… Pamela Mitchell
I feel like I need to apologize for my essay on Bristol's Colston Hall kerfuffle.
I have a habit of writing in a light, semi-ironic, affable style. And this is appropriate for writing about comic books and children's television. If "well, last weeks Doctor Who was an embarrassing piece of fifth rate horse shit, wasn't it" mutates in the editing stage into "In the future, committed Time Lord followers may not look back on last week's story with feelings of unalloyed pleasure" no harm is done. But I am afraid I sometimes allow my tones of whimsical bemusement to permeate subjects which really matter.
Ursula Le Guin berates C.S Lewis and his contemporaries for writing as if from a high-church club which treats the rest of the universe with slightly amused disdain. That's probably where I got it from.
For the avoidance of doubt: the Colston Hall Kerfuffle is not one of those subjects which really matters. Twenty years ago, my position would have been broadly "If the name changes, jolly good; if it doesn't change, never mind." Contrary to what you may read in the Guardian, the people of Bristol are not in thrall to a Colston cult, any more than the people of Charing Cross are in thrall to the worship of Eleanor of Castille. You can't move in Bath for bakeries which sell the only original Bath Bun, and the recipe for William Oliver's extremely dull biscuits is a jealously guarded secret. But I had literally never heard of Colston Buns before the Great Kerfuffle started.
But the scheme to rebrand the Hall has brought a lot of very nasty arguments out of the woodwork; and it has revealed that some people hold some very nasty beliefs -- about history, about the city of Bristol and about the world in general. And this matters very much indeed.
I feel like I need to re-write that piece with an Obama style "anger interpreter" at my side.
Here is the entire text of a letter which was printed in the Guardian last week. It is a piece of writing which literally made me shake with rage. It has so many of the typical characteristics of this kind of "green inker" that I am tempted to wonder if I accidentally wrote it myself and submitted it to the Guardian as a wind up. But I fear it is quite real.
Unlike many of the (mainly) students who campaigned to get the name of Colston Hall changed, I am a Bristolian born and bred, and I am so incensed that the management has kowtowed to these so-called activists. I have to reluctantly agree for the first time with the former Bristol Conservative leader Richard Eddy that we cannot change history, and that place names give us a link with the past. Edward Colston gave the land on which the eponymous hall stands for the building of a school for orphaned and destitute boys. This is still thriving today, in a different part of the city. He also left money for almshouses for the poor, and with the residue of his fortune a girls’ school was founded (which, incidentally, one of the spokespeople for the anti-Colston name brigade attended, and presumably benefited from its excellent education).
Many cities and towns in Britain have monuments and buildings dedicated to people who were not 100% PC to our modern overtender sensibilities – leaders of industry in the north, who allowed children down mines, or forced them to crawl under looms. They did not all give part of their wealth to alleviate the lot of the poor of their cities as Colston did. Where does this nonsense end?
This is all about money. The management of Colston Hall is trying to attract sponsorship for its renovation and future preservation by offering corporate naming. So look out for the Tesco Hall or the McDonald’s Hall sometime soon. Silly, unnecessary, embarrassing to the city. I sincerely hope that Bristolians stop this in its tracks, keep the Colston name (while fully acknowledging the horrors of slavery) and leave history to the historians
Exegesis is what we do here, so let us exegize.
1: "I am a Bristolian born and bred"
In the first sentence, we discover what the Great Kerfuffle is really all about. It's not about one theater or one historical person of dubious reputation. It's about nativism.
No-one in real life ever uses the word "Bristolian". (If you needed an adjective, you would just say "Bristol": "Blackbeard is thought to have been a Bristol sailor" or "The Bristol dialect is dying out.") No-one ever claims to be a Portsmouthian or a South Gloucesterani either. You might possibly say that someone was a Londoner, but you would just mean that they lived in London.
I know what it means to be born in Bristol, but who ever used the word "bred" of a person? You've never heard anyone say "Tolkien was born in South Africa, but bred in Oxford" or "Although he was bred in the United States, Bob Hope was actually born in Kent." Born-and-bred is one of those portmanteau words. It means "I have lived in this city all my life". It is only ever used to contrast "us", who were born-and-bred in Bristol and therefore have some kind of special status, with "you", who do not.
The writer thinks that only people who have lived in Bristol all their lives should have a say about what happens in the city; at any rate that born-and-bred-Bristolians have some special insight into what concert halls should be called that is denied to people who were bred here but not born here, or born here but not bred here, or people like me who were neither born nor bred here.
How long do you have to have lived in a municipality before you get a say in what happens here, do you suppose? I've lived in Bristol for twenty years. Do I have to travel back to London come local election time, like Mary and Joseph, or is there some process of naturalization?
Nativism is as foul when applied to a city as it is when it is applied to a country. It is about creating an "us", who are true Bristolians, real Americans, pure Germans and a "them" who just happen to live here. Sometimes, it may even happen, quite coincidentally, that "we", the natives, are mostly of one particular race (white, for the sake of argument) and "you", the incomers, are of a different race, perhaps (in some hypothetical case) black or Asian.
2: Kowtowed
You might think that a music trust would be quite capable of deciding for itself whether it wants to rebrand a building which it happens to own. You might think "We don't want to call it the Colston Hall any more because we feel the name is associated with the slave trade" was a perfectly good explanation for the rebranding, whether you agree with it or not.
But in fact there is always some conspiracy at play. It always turns out that some nebulous Other has forced its will on Us Natives. In this case it turns out that the change of name is Us Bristolians making an act of ritual submission to a group of Non Bristolian Students.
"a complete surrender to the forces of historically illiterate political correctness"
and
"pandering to the views of a tiny minority of non-Bristolians".
3: So-called activists.
If the Non-Bristolian Students were trying to persuade the Bristol Music Trust to change the name of their hall, then they are, by definition, activists. If the letter writer is trying to persuade the Music Trust to reverse the decision, then they are, by definition, also an activist. That is what the word means. "So-called" is doing nothing in the sentence at all. It is a zombie word. The letter would be improved if we substituted "these pooey activists".
4: We cannot change history
The green inkers say this over and over again. You can't change history. You can't change history.
What does it mean?
No-one is traveling back in time and making it so that the sign outside Colston Hall already said Wilberforce Hall in the 19th century, although that would be an interesting premise for a Doctor Who story. No-one is denying, or trying to suppress the fact that some Victorian slavery apologists named a building after a slave trader, any more than anyone is denying that at one time Saddam Hussein was the ruler of Iraq, or that Jimmy Savile once worked for the BBC. We're just taking down some statues and some nameplates.
In 1867 the name plate was put up; in 2020 it was taken down. That's as much a part of history as anything else.
5: Edward Colston gave the land on which the eponymous hall stands for the building of a school for orphaned and destitute boys.
Robinson Crusoe is the eponymous character in Daniel Defoe's novel (the book his named after him); although she is the eponymous character, Abigail does not actually appear in the play Abigail's Party. It is just possible that if you said that Colston Hall was the eponymous building in a novel called "Murder at the Hall", we would know what you meant. But in no possible sense can you call Colston Hall "the eponymous hall". Dropping four syllable jurisdiction words into the middle of phenomenon sentences doesn't improve an incorporeal argument.
It is true that in 1708 Colston's school was intended to educate 100 poor boys, provided they were not Methodists. The school which now bears his name educates anyone of any gender or religion provided their parents have £13,000 a year to spend on school fees.
6: Brigade
Green inkers always see everyone else as forming brigades. One wonders why it is never the "political correctness squadron" or the "health and safety corps"
7: ...Presumably benefited from its excellent education.
People sometimes complain when a person who has been to grammar school argues that grammar schools are a bad idea; or when a person who went to private school says that private schools are unfair. "You have benefited from a grammar school education, now you want to deny it to others" they say. (The correct answer to this is "No, you mugwump, I want to ban second class carriages".)
The writer seems to be creating a new argument based on the same template and ending up with word salad: "You have attended a school which was named after a slave trader and now you want to deny the right of a music venue to be named after a slave trader." What?
8: ....not 100% PC to our modern overtender sensibilities
And now it comes.
"PC" -- political correctness -- is a pejorative term for "politeness".
More specifically, it is what green inkers call the belief that you should avoid words like "wog", "cripple", "spastic" and "nigger" because they upset people.
Even more specifically, it represents the belief that a group of so-called activists, very probably from out of town, and very probably organized into brigades, are actively preventing everyone else from using these words, as part of a plot to destroy western civilization. (So you should jolly well go out of your way to use bad words, otherwise you'll be kowtowing to the PC brigade!)
I suppose that if I called someone "black" when the preferred term was "person of colour", or if I said "blind" to someone who thought of themselves as "visually impaired" you might say that I wasn't being 100% politically correct -- in other words, that I had inadvertently and unintentionally used a word which might possibly have given a small amount of offence.
Buying and selling black people as if they were livestock is, in the mind of the person who wrote this letter, roughly comparable to inadvertently using a bad word.
"Not 100% PC."
In fact, it is not even quite that bad. Buying and selling black people as if they were livestock is not, in itself, less than 100% PC; it is less than 100% PC only from the point of view of our "modern, over-tender sensibilities."
"Over-tender."
We disprove of slavery because we are a little bit too gentle, too kind, too affectionate.
"Over-tender."
How politically incorrect would buying and selling black people be if we were exactly the right amount tender?
Oh, and it's only from the modern point of view that buying and selling black people like livestock is a bit like accidentally using a slightly bad word. From the olden days point of view it was even less bad than that.
I keep hearing this kind of thing. You can't judge the past by the standards of the present. People back then didn't realize that slavery was wrong.
Yes you can and yes they did.
Well, Mrs Miggins from the pie-shop who had never traveled outside her own village might, I suppose, just possibly, have honestly believed that negroes were a special kind of monkey and cruelty to them wasn't the same as cruelty to people, in the same way that she might have honestly thought that the world was flat and there were unicorns in India. But Bristol was a port town. Edward Colston lived in London. He had met black people, he had talked to black people. He had traded with black people. He knew that they were human beings, just like him. And he bought and sold them anyway.
Yes, free agricultural labourers worked longer hours than we would put up with today.
Yes, it wasn't only slaves who were flogged, it was soldiers and sailors and kids and horse thieves too.
Yes, there was a Star Trek story about a planet where the slave caste was treated quite well all things considered.
Yes, if you honestly believed in witches then you might honestly believe in killing witches.
Be as culturally relativistic as you like.
Slavery. Was. Never. Okay.
9: – leaders of industry in the north, who allowed children down mines, or forced them to crawl under looms --
This form of not actually saying anything at all is known as "what-about-ery". If I say "here is a bad thing" you reply "here is another bad thing". If I say "let's do a sensible thing" then you reply "then you must do a stupid thing as well."
The logic of the position is "you cannot fix anything unless you can fix everything; you cannot fix big injustices unless you also fix small ones, you cannot fix small injustices unless you also fix big ones." If you think that it is in rather bad taste to open a pub in Whitechapel called "The Jack the Ripper" then you must logically want every pub and every building named for Henry VIII, who after all also killed two of his wives, to be taken down. If you allow women to vote, you'll have to allow farm animals to vote as well. If you allow gay people to get married, soon you'll have to allow hamsters and deckchairs to get married.
Yes, it would be a good thing if there were no memorial to anyone who had ever made his fortune from human trafficking. Yes, it would be a good thing if there were no memorial to anyone who had ever profited from child labour. (*) This is where we happen to be starting.
A different green inker in the Guardian said that if we removed Colston's name from the theater, we would also have to tear the words of Amazing Grace out of every hymn book in the world, because John Newton was also a slave trader. This is a moronic comment at two levels. Firstly, and I don't know how many different ways it is possible to say this WE. ARE. NOT. PULLING. THE. BUILDING. DOWN. WE. ARE. JUST. CHANGING. THE. NAME. OVER. THE. DOOR. And secondly because John Newton, famously, was ashamed of being a slave trader. (*) John Newton thought that being a slave trader was wicked. John Newton thought that it was amazing that God still loved him even though he was a former slave trader. The clue's in the title.
10: They did not all give part of their wealth to alleviate the lot of the poor of their cities as Colston did.
We've covered this. Using money to set up schools for poor white children (provided they are not Methodists) in England does NOT make it okay to have made the money by kidnapping black children in Africa. If anything, it makes it worse.
11: Where does this nonsense end?
It ends when there is no-one left in the world who thinks that being a slave trader was, all things considered, not really too bad.
12: This is all about money.
You have changed your entire argument mid-letter, you complete and utter dunderhead.
Your whole argument was that the management of Colston Hall were ritually abasing themselves before the non-Bristolian forces of Political Correctness. Suddenly it has nothing to do with incomers or activists or PC gone mad -- it's just a business decision.
Quite a sensible business decision, if you ask me. If the government is cutting spending on the arts, then the arts are going to have to seek private sponsorship. I wouldn't worry about Tescos Hall or McDonalds hall. Halls don't get named after supermarkets or burger bars: McDonalds wouldn't sponsor a hall that's already selling posh burgers and coffee, and their name is too famous already for it to be a good investment. But concert halls do get named after individual donors. By all means, take down the name of the nasty person who had nothing whatsoever to do with the founding of the hall in the 19th century, and replace it with the name of someone who has contributed some money to keep it going in the 21st.
13: I sincerely hope that Bristolians...
Real Bristolians? True Bristolians? People who were born in the city? Or people like me who just happen to live here?
14: while fully acknowledging the horrors of slavery...
Now there's an idea.
I have been fortunate enough to have attended the Wagner festival in Bayreuth on two occasions. Bayreuth is another place which has to come to terms with its past. Richard Wagner's opinions about Jewish people were not 100% politically correct, and the place was frequently attended by Adolf Hitler, whose policy of gassing Jews would be unacceptable to our perhaps over tender modern sensibilities.
The second time I went to the festspielhaus, there was an exhibition outside the building, memorializing every Jewish person known to have performed at the theater, from the time of Wagner down to the Nazi era. (Wagner himself was quite prepared to hire Jewish musicians, it seems: only after he died was it discovered that only people born and bred in Germany could understand the master's music.) As you walked through the exhibition, you found that more and more of the performers had ended up in the concentration camps. This seems to be a positive way of dealing with the place's Nazi associations. You admit to the bad thing, you deplore the bad thing, you actively tell people about the badness of the bad thing. But under no circumstances do you say that the bad thing wasn't too bad, or was only bad by today's standards and that we shouldn't judge the past by the standards of the present.
It helps that the good thing which Wagner did (compose the Ring Cycle) and the bad thing which Wagner did (hate Jewish people) are different and unrelated. (*) It is possible to say "We condemn Richard Wagner for promoting anti-semitism; but we continue to celebrate him for composing Siegfried's funeral music." It would be harder to say "We condemn Jimmy Savile for molesting thousands of children, but we will continue to celebrate him for giving money to children's hospitals in order to gain access to children to molest."
Some Jewish people would say that you can't ever denazify Bayreuth: Wagner's music is irrevocably tainted by its connection with Hitler. I respect that point of view.
Instead of tearing down the kitsch Victorian statue of Colston in the center of Bristol, maybe we could have an exhibition along the lines of the one in Bayreuth? Perhaps we could commission a second statue, say of a slave, or of an anti-slavery campaigner, and put it right next to him... Maybe the slave statue could be positioned so that it was staring at Colston, accusing him in some way? Maybe there could be a permanent display about the Royal African Company? Maybe there could be some kind of memorial to the something like 100,000 people trafficked in Colston's lifetime, like the 127,000 shrouds that were put outside Bristol Cathedral to mark the Battle of the Somme. I bet that we even know the names of the some of the individual slaves. Their names could go on the memorial as well.
Would the green inkers agree to that?
Or would they say that it was another example politically correct out-of-towners interfering with life in "our" city?
NOTE:
1721 -- Death of Edward Colston
1807 -- Abolition of the Slave Trade
1833 -- Abolition of Slavery in British colonies
1863 -- American Emancipation proclamation
1865 -- End of American Civil War
1867 -- First theater named Colston Hall opened
1890 -- Colston Window installed in Bristol Cathedral
1891 -- Colston Girls school opened
1895 -- Statue of Colston erected
1898 -- Second theater named Colston Hall opened
1951 -- Present theater named Colston Hall opened
1973 -- Colston Tower opened
The Bristol Colston cult largely comes from the years after the end of slavery; very conspicuously, Colston Hall opened two years after the end of the American Civil War. The Victorians putting up the statues, the windows and the schools absolutely knew that slavery was not okay; but chose, for some reason, to retrospectively create a myth of the saintly slave trader. Why?
When a series has been running for more than half a century, it is inevitably going to acquire a lot of baggage. Some franchises expand outwards: it turns out that Klingons and Romulans are not enough to keep life interesting, so we discover there are also Cardasians and Ferengi and Borg and Gamma Quadrants. This makes a universe which is more fun for the dedicated geek, but less accessible to the casual viewer. DC Comics shakes up the cosmic Etch-a-Sketch and starts again every couple of decades, and even Marvel has come to terms with the fact that some of the narrative crimes which have been committed against Spider-Man can be unwritten.
Doctor Who has never really acquired a complicated back-story in quite that way. The history of the Daleks and the Cybermen is more or less re-invented from scratch every time they pop up. Last season's unforgivable Hell Bent made no more sense to those of us who are up to speed on Gallifreyan lore than it did to people who were completely ignorant about it.
What Doctor Who does is expand inwards. The iconography stays much the same as it was in 1970 but each icon is progressively overlaid with more and more layers of symbolism.
The TARDIS is a fantastically sophisticated apparatus constructed by an inconceivably advanced civilization which the Doctor alone understands. It is at the same time a broken down obsolete cobbled together piece of junk that hardly ever goes where the Doctor wants it to. This reflects the dual naturae of the Doctor himself. He is both an omniscient benevolent star-man and a wandering hobo in broken down jalopy. (Compare this, incidentally, with Star Wars: the Millennium Falcon is both an incredibly cool turbo charged flying saucer and an embarrassingly unreliable hunk of junk.)
One of the amazing and wonderful things about the TARDIS is that it merges seamlessly into its surroundings wherever it lands. One of the way we know it is a broken down pile of junk is that this feature doesn’t work: it always and only looks like an obsolete English phone box. Which is part and parcel of another obvious duality: the Doctor is an ancient alien who has traveled all round the universe but at the same time he is parochially and archaically British.
It really doesn’t do to think about this stuff too much. If it turned out that tea and jelly babies were simply an alien fare which the Doctor has acquired a taste for, then some of the point of them would be lost. Tea means to the Doctor what it does to the average stereotypical Brit. If it turned out that the Doctor drank tea on Earth but blogwart bloodjuice on the planet Zog then we would lose our sense that the Doctor is British. Last week, Bill wanted to know why the T.A.R.D.I.S acronym works in English if the Doctor is an alien. This week she wanted to know why the Doctor was Scottish. And of course Rose wondered why the Doctor sounded as if he came from the North. Speculate, if you must, that tea and crumpets and cricket are actually the protrusion into our dimension of an ancient Time Lord custom; say that that the Doctor comes to England because England reminds him of Gallifrey. The truth is that the Doctor is a British alien. (The Time Lords are British aliens; the Daleks are British fascists; the Cybermen are British borg.) The whole point of Doctor Who is that everywhere in time and space is forever England, just as the whole point of Star Trek is that everyone in the whole galaxy believes in the great American dream. But don't draw our attention to this, or we might stop believing it.
In the very olden days, the Doctor couldn’t control the TARDIS at all, either because it was broken, or because he had somehow forgotten how it worked. Tom Baker claimed to have fitted a randomizer so that neither he nor the Time Lords knew where he was going to land next. Script Editor Robert Holmes was having none of it: according to him the Time Lords controlled the movement of the TARDIS, and always have done, even before the Time Lords had been thought of.
Last week, the TARDIS was something to do with memory: Time and Relative Dimension in Space meant being like God and perceiving every moment as a present moment. This week, the TARDIS is back to being a character. “You don’t steer the TARDIS; you negotiate with her” says the Doctor. This is what any mucker might say about his jalopy ("Aaar, she be wilful until ye knows her manner!”). But it is also the literal truth: in the Doctor's Wife the incarnate TARDIS says that she didn't always take the Doctor where he wanted to go, but always took him where he needed to go. Taking the idea and running with it, Doctor Peter says this week that the TARDIS “finds the still point between where you want to be and where you need to be.”
How is this different from saying that “this old ship of mine is an aimless thing”? Both are blatantly admitting that the TARDIS is driven by the power of The Plot: the Doctor will always land where The Plot says he should land. But the old wanderer in the aimless Ship resonates differently from the lonely god in the semi-sentient vessel that knows where he needs to go. Robert Holmes retro-conceit was an admission that the TARDIS is not aimless, and never has been: it always ends up on an earth colony just before the downtrodden underclass rebel against their tyrannical insect overlords. “The still point between wanting and needing” is equally an admission that the show now less about the adventures and more about the Doctor. He will always end up in a situation where Character Development can happen.
Bill wonders why the Doctor, given that he has fixed so many things about the TARDIS, doesn’t just fix its fading-into-the-background mechanism. This question was first raised as far back as the American telemovie: Doctor Paul's answer was "I like it like this". Doctor Peter's answers are equally evasive, but Bill catches him out and reveals that the shape of the TARDIS is a symbol. It is a Police Box, and the Doctor goes around fixing people’s problems, like a policeman. And on the door it says “Advice and assistance obtainable immediately”, which is what the Doctor does -- go around the universe giving people advice and assistance.
Which is quite a neat observation.
But it is the sort of neat observation that a fan ought to be making on a blog, not the sort of neat observation that a companion should be making in the TV series. The one thing the Prince of Denmark can never do is notice that he's speaking in iambic pentameters — and English iambic pentameters, at that.
In the end, this stuff feels like pouring purple food dye in the Atlantic Ocean. If the new explanation were accepted — the Doctor chose a Police Box because it symbolized who he wanted to be; the TARDIS is a mystical being who takes the Doctor to places where she thinks he needs to go — then you've redefined Doctor Who. And there is only so far you can go from the cantankerous wanderer with the bust time machine without breaking the show. But the new explanation won't be accepted. There will be another one a long in a minute. It's like the preacher who gives a brilliantly clever allegorical interpretation of his text this week, and next week, gives and equally brilliant but entirely different allegorical interpretation of the same text. After a few weeks, you start to wonder why he bothers.
Sydney Newman said that any writer who revealed the secret of Doctor Who should undercut the explanation by the end of the episode, to give other writers a chance. It seems to me that any attempt to pluck out the heart of the Doctor's mystery is now automatically undercut by the show itself.
2:
Nothing dates as fast as the future. Remember Four To Doomsday, where everyone spoke in hushed tones about something called a “silicon chip”, or even The War Machines where someone had developed a computer so powerful that it could do four figure square roots in mere seconds? Even that moment in End of the World where Cassandra mistakes a wurlitzer for an I-pod is starting to look distinctly of its time.
This week's story is based heavily around the emoji fad: and it was looking out of date before it had even been transmitted.
The idea of putting tiny little pictures into you emails may turn out to this month’s craze; or it may turn out to be a whole new form of media that will swing the result of the 2024 elections. Back in the days of Usenet, there were people who thought that typing ":)" after a joke presaged the end of human literacy, if not human civilization; but most of us could see that there was a need for some new punctuation marks to indicate expression and tone of voice. But for a long time I could see no purpose at all in text messages. Why on earth would I send a telegram when I had my own personal walkie-talkie in my pocket at all times? Nowadays my phone, like everyone else's is primarily an SMS device, and I am quite taken aback when someone wants to speak words to me in their voice. Everything from Thunderbirds to Cold Comfort Farm predicted that, in the Future, everyone would talk to everyone else on videophones. Now I really have a perfectly functional videophone in my pocket, I mostly talk in teeny tiny telegrams. All the great historical events of our lives present themselves to us, not as solemn announcements on Radio 4, but as 140 character tweets. "Trump starts nuclear war. Bye! #bunker" “Queen Dead. Charles King. #sad”.
So it's quite possible that eighteen months from now I won't know how I ever managed without emojis.
There is probably a good story to be told about the emoji phenomenon. What would the world be like if picture language — hieroglyphics — replaced ordinary text or indeed ordinary speech as the primary form of communication, and therefore as the primary form of thought? Presumably, the young people's picture language would develop its own grammar and its own poetry -- just like British and American sign language -- and presumably that would be very different from the old people's written language. I am very nearly 35 and even I can see that half the fun of emojis is cleverly putting two or three symbols together in a way that your friend will understand but other people might not. The digital natives are probably doing much cleverer things which haven't filtered down to me yet. Could we eventually end up with two generations -- even two species -- who simply cannot talk to reach other? Remember that episode of Star Trek The Next Generation where the aliens communicated only in allegory?
But Smile is not that story. I am not even sure if the writer quite understands what an emoji is.
The Doctor and Bill have to explore a Big Dumb Object, an empty white city populated by little chumblies with TV screens for heads. They communicate by showing different smiley faces on their screens. They give the Doctor and Bill little badges which also display happy and sad faces depending on their mood. They have to wear the badges on their backs, so they can’t ever know what mood is being displayed. If one of the badges ever turns "sad", the person wearing it will be eaten by a school of microscopic robot piranhas and used as fertilizer by the chumblies.
What has happened, as usual, is that the robots have interpreted their orders to keep humans happy too literally, and simply killed everyone who wasn’t. This has created an epidemic, because whenever a human being was killed, the human beings around him became even sadder and had to be killed as well.
So not, in fact, a story about emojis at all, even if we keep referring to the chumblies as Emojibots. Emojis are little pictures of cups of tea and hearts and bunnies and turds which young people use in text messages. What this story is about is emoticons -- little representations of happy and sad faces which everyone has been using for decades. Possible, like me, Cottrell-Boyce thought that emoji meant "picture representing an emotion" where actually it is simply Japanese for picture-character.
If this isn't about emojis then what is it about? Nothing very much at all, so far as I can tell. Some of the banter is quite fun, and I was amused by the blue jelly food substitute. But there is nothing to it. The writer knows that he wants a scene in which our heroes are cornered by robots with smiley faces, knowing that if they themselves stop smiling, they will be instantly reduced to a skeleton. But he really can't think of any plausible reason for this scenario to have come about. The Doctor goes through three progressively less convincing theories about how the Big Dumb Object works. “The robots have built the city and are waiting for the colonists” works. “The robots have built the city and then wiped out all the colonists” also works. “The robots built the city and then wiped out some of the colonists but there are some spares in cold storage” feels like multiplying hypothesis.
Still, it leaves us with a decent riddle: “The invisible robot piranhas will kill anyone who is sad; once the new batch of humans discover that the old batch have been killed, they will be sad, How do you stop the robots from killing them?" One would imagine that the solution to this problem would involve some combination of
a: Explaining to the piranhas that it’s okay to be sad. Dammit, Jim, it’s part of what makes us human...
or
b; Persuading the humans that they don’t need to be sad about their families having been eaten by piranhas (a tougher call, admittedly.)
In fact, the solution turns out to be, “The Doctor does a thing and the bad thing goes away.” He is actually said, on screen, to have “switched the robots off and switched them on again.” (Since we aren't talking about a software glitch, but robots following their programming too literally, it's hard to see how this would help.) The presence of the Doctor makes everything all right; there is no need for any story-internal explanation.
Douglas Adams famously got round the improbability of some of the events in the Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy by giving his heroes a space ship which caused improbable things to happen wherever they went. Cottrell-Boyce gets round the problem of not being able to think of an ending for his story by having the Doctor recite a version of the “three wishes” fairy tale. You know, the one where the silly farmer has to use his third wish to undo the results of the first two? In the Doctor’s version, the third wish is “I wish I had never made the first two wishes”. The solution to all life's problems is for the Doctor to press the re-set button.
In case we miss the point, the Doctor's version of the fairy tale is called "the magic haddock". This is as clear and deliberate a signal as I can imagine that the writer is perfectly aware he is writing but really can't think of anything better.
Still, that's the one thing I will take away from the story. From now on, when the Doctor or anyone else solves a problem by just happening to have a can of anti-plastic spray in his pocket, I will turn around and say “Magic haddock! Magic haddock”
